Monthly Archives: May 2014

The translation of the word palabra from Spanish to English is word but the Turkish word palavra means a lie or bogus. Words have power and although the saying goes a “picture is worth a thousand words”, this is not always true.

A single word or a paragraph can have power that ranges from ability to change people temporarily or the whole world permanently.

Everyone has unpleasant parts or events in their lives that they prefer to forget about, sometimes no good ever comes from nostalgic nightmares.

Something that is very personal to me, and something perhaps that most people I know don’t know about me is that, the words that can be seen on this image was uttered to me. The letters read something that is obviously not pleasant but when put into context, it was debilitating at the time.

In 2008, I was raped.

I will not talk about the whirlwind of emotions and traumas that this caused but even after many years, I still remember the words my attacker said to me afterwards. I wanted to take away the power of the word by breaking it apart and recreating it photographically. Each of the letters is an anonymous mark on the walls that had no choice but be written on.

I am sharing my experience completely openly, probably despite what majority of my friends would advise me. It is shocking that there is an estimate of 60,000 to 95,000 rape victims per year in England and Wales.

As one of those individuals, it was the emotional side that hurt me more. Talking about it was the most healing. I hope that people speak out and not be afraid.

Every photographer has a specific genre or a few which they stay away from. The idea of a still-life and especially the cliche of photographing beautiful flowers were as tasty as drinking burnt caramel on a very hot day; bitter and dehydrating. I guess my blood sugar must have been very low for me to challenge this viewpoint.

Alexander James, a very talented photographer, uses classic nature morte objects and photographs them underwater in a black velvet-lined glass tank. I was inspired by his subversion of the classic genre by shooting objects differently. He gave a painting-like appearance to them through his technique of obtaining the image rather than through post processing.

I was also inspired by Impressionistic paintings, especially Monet and his works from his garden in Giverny. I wanted to breakdown some of their elements such as allowing pure colour to form a structure rather than black shadows and white highlights.

I transformed my bathroom into a tiny studio where a desk lamp became my only light source and my bathtub was where my subjects stood, or more accurately floated against the oscillations of waves created by a plastic lid and cascades of water from a pot. To challenge my photographic practice, I too stood away from post processing. The colours of the flowers on the camera were as vivid as they appear on the screen and only minute adjustments were made.

I hope you will enjoy my off-tangent series of work. This caramel was not burnt and accompanied my vanilla ice cream very well, and it was not overbearingly hot.